what did you end up doing? I am a freshman in college and right now Im a chem major with a spanish minor. But i dont see myself going to more school after I graduate. Im doubting whether or not Im in the right field.
With just a BS in Chem you are pretty much on par with liberal arts majors that have degrees not directly applicable to business. The jobs applicable to a chem degree are low paying, dead end, and very unstable (typically temp/contract) so you get no benefits and are forced to work for a parasite agency like Kelly or Aerotek skimming off a large part of what should be your pay. I would strongly not recommend getting a Chem major if you intend to hit the job market after graduating. I also would not recommend science grad school. the MS is treated as a BS and 2 years of experience or worthless. PhD programs are a freak show of exploitation and abuse by academia often leading to nothing but endless post-docs that are a career purgatory that many willnever escape.
The only reason to get a science BS is for professional school. Otherwise you are wasting your time and money.
I know two PhD’s in Chemistry that are still looking for work. They work as Post-Doc in school as cheap labor for professors. Their field of study is so specialized; it is good for school, but not good for industry. My recommendation is to go into Chemical Engineering; you can find with a Bachelor degree.
I have been searching online for a while for a statistically meaningful sample of people’s outcomes (what they actually DID) after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, with limited success.
I found a National Science Foundation table ( http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf10318/pdf/tab35.pdf ), the data of which certainly involves enough people, but it is a little old (2006) and doesn’t go into the detail I want. In 2006, for the 23,000 working graduates that graduated in the two years preceding 2006, 10,100 were working in the chemistry field broadly, 7,700 were not in chemistry but were working somewhere in the sciences or engineering, and 5,300 were working in a field totally unrelated.
For detail I have gone to the Alumni Contact Center at studentsreview.com and looked at the job histories of the 40 people there reporting bachelor’s degrees in chemistry. The people may have been at any stage of their career. Of the 40, eight were graduate students in chemistry, seven were either physicians or in medical school, four were analytical chemists, somebody was a ‘stability chemist’ (probably an analytical chemist), someone who had gone to grad school was a research chemist, three were for a large part of their career project leaders/managers (probably related to chemistry), someone was in quality assurance, someone else was a document coordinator, two were engineers, one was a patent attorney, another a business analyst, two were in technical sales. There was a professor and two teachers. There was a ‘director of men’s health’ who didn’t seem to be a physician, a women’s non-profit network director, an ‘account’ engineer, a chemical operator and a personal care giver.
While I think my working experience was atypical, I’ll briefly mention it. BEFORE I went to a university I worked in laboratories. I started washing glassware, but I got to do cyanide analysis after a time. After getting my bachelor’s degree in chemistry, I again did analyses that were pre-set procedures. I was unsatisfied with this and in time found a job in a research setting where I developed new sample preparation methods using my chemical knowledge and ideas from literature searches. Most of my co-workers there had PhDs and did less inventive work than I did. I got what I wanted, but I swam against the current to get it.